Wednesday, 28 June 2017

Magical Times

Ben Shapiro delves into the minimum wage and “pre-existing conditions” and concludes:

Politics used to be the art of educating the public about reality and pushing for change where change is possible. Now politics is the art of convincing the public that you can make reality disappear if it votes for you. Sadly, our politicians can’t make reality disappear. And every time they try to do so, reality comes rushing back with a vengeance.

A great deal of economic policy is marred by magical thinking. The Left has its supernatural Keynesian multiplier effect, the Right has its self-financing tax cuts, and everybody clings to the myth about Henry Ford bootstrapping his business into greater profitability by paying his factory workers enough to buy his cars, which is a complete fiction. The truth is that demand curves slope downward: If you raise the price of something, including an hour of fry-guy labor, buyers will want less of it.

But magical thinking is much easier, and much more amenable to the political cast of mind, than undertaking the very hard, thankless, and uncertain work of doing the things necessary to turn low-skilled, low-earning workers into more productive and prosperous workers. Magical thinking is how you get a major political party and its hothouse intellectuals seriously convinced that the way to make health care more affordable is to pass a law called the Affordable Care Act. It is how you get Republican budget proposals that involve jacking up spending on the military, keeping Social Security and Medicare on their current stratospheric trajectories, cutting taxes, and ... balancing the budget in ten years. (“But we’ll cut foreign aid!”) It’s how you decide to fix the problem of illegal immigration with a wall on the southern border when most illegal immigrants do not enter by sneaking over the border. It is how you spend 60 years thinking your prissy little moral declarations about the necessity of good public education for every child will result in a good public education for every child, how you come to believe that shouting “Health care is a human right!” will somehow summon general practitioners from the vasty deep and exnihilate hospital beds into existence.